I think this is one litmus test of a functional Christian church – how would, how do, the members including leaders react to one of themselves being ‘martyred’ by political correctness for his clear unambiguous adherence to unpopular/ ‘evil’ church doctrine. Is the instinct to shun ‘bad publicity’ for the institution or to leap to assist and form a spear bristling shield wall?

Would church members rally-round, provide psychological support – would they raise money among themselves to physically sustain a member who lost his liveihood as a consequence of SJW persecution? Would senior leaders of the church get on the phone or visit ASAP to pledge their support?

What a difference that makes! That is certainly what ought to happen in such situations – the ‘hero’/ scapegoat would then know that the people *who mattered* were on his side. This is surely what churches should be doing for their members in these times (and some certainly are): so each Christian knows that it is *us* against the world, not just me against the world.

I’ve always assumed that if I were exposed and denounced by SJWs, even if only and explicitly for my adherence to Catholic moral teachings (not my admittedly heterodox beliefs on racism and immigration), the Church (meaning my parish and diocese, assuming they found out about it) would insist that it is a tolerant, merciful organization that has nothing to do with hateful homophobic bigots like me. I would not be excommunicated, but Mass attendance would become a socially awkward affair. I don’t think my parish or diocese is particularly bad, by the way, but my guess is that not one in a thousand would stand up for someone the secular press was saying mean things about.

What do you think? Am I being pessimistic? Would the Church be correct to disown me?

Staying out of mortal sin is difficult for almost everybody (something I’ll elaborate on in part III), and only a minority of Catholics really even try. Given this, it’s remarkable more Catholics don’t just throw up their hands and say “Well, if I’m living in mortal sin anyway, I might as well enjoy myself and do whatever I want.”

In the United States, by some estimates fully 40 percent of Indian-Americans hail from Gujarat, where a large proportion belong to the Swaminarayan sect of Hinduism, distinctive for its emphasis on uncritical obedience to the utterances of the current leader of the sect, whose title is Pramukh Swami Maharaj. On a visit to the elaborate multimillion-dollar Swaminarayan temple in Bartlett, Ill., I was given a tour by a young man recently arrived from Gujarat, who delighted in telling me the simplistic Hindu-right story of India’s history, and who emphatically told me that whenever Pramukh Swami speaks, one is to regard it as the direct voice of God and obey without question. At that point, with a beatific smile, the young man pointed up to the elaborate marble ceiling and asked, “Do you know why this ceiling glows the way it does?” I said I didn’t, and I confidently expected an explanation invoking the spiritual powers of Pramukh Swami. My guide smiled even more broadly. “Fiber-optic cables,” he told me. “We are the first ones to put this technology into a temple.” There you see what can easily wreck democracy: a combination of technological sophistication with utter docility. I fear that many democracies around the world, including our own, are going down that road, through a lack of emphasis on the humanities and arts and an unbalanced emphasis on profitable skills.

Guess what liberals–you don’t own total internal reflection! A person can be a whiz at optics or electronics while being a Hindu nationalist who thinks the Muslims are screwing up everything or a Swaminarayan Hindu who thinks the Guru is to be obeyed without question. Notice how what really bothers her is not that the guy is a fanatic, but that he knows our technology. The cartel that’s supposed to keep science and technology away from illiberals has somehow been bypassed. The cure, of course, is “humanities and arts”, i.e. indoctrination.

Social scientists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog have written a book trying to explain the intriguing fact that engineering graduates are strongly overrepresented among Islamic terrorists. In fact, they find it’s not just Islamists; “neo-Nazi”, “white supremacist”, and “neo-Stalinist” movements are also disproportionately filled with engineers. Readers familiar with the standard Frankfurt school slanders of conservatives won’t be surprised by the conclusions in the linked article. Engineering schools and terrorist movements both attract people who are uncomfortable with moral ambiguity, who don’t appreciate other peoples’ perspectives, who uncritically accept the social status quo and existing hierarchies. I really do wonder if social scientists sit back and read their own bullshit, or if cultural Marxism just goes on autopilot. The idea that the trigger-sensitive, microaggression witch-hunters in the humanities and social sciences have some exquisite appreciation for moral ambiguity is pretty funny in itself, but suggesting that Islamist recruits suffer from an uncritical acceptance of the status quo is just preposterous.

In fact, many of the comments in that article make little sense for the ostensible topic of the cause of terrorism, but make much more sense in terms of the actions they seem designed to motivate. Again, if Islamism and terrorism are the issues, why complain that engineers aren’t taught to question authority? What sense does it make to criticize an “ideology of depoliticization”? Wouldn’t such an ideology be great for someone who might otherwise be attracted to Islamism or some other “extremist” movement? Similarly, why worry about a drop in “public mindedness” and “social consciousness” of students during their engineering years? Muslim terrorists are extremely public/socially minded. Why worry about diluted general education requirements? What does that have to do with anything?

Here’s a clue.

Gambetta and Hertog chose proxy measures for these traits among Western European, male college graduates polled by the European Social Survey. The need for closure and embrace of hierarchy, for example, were correlated with survey questions that elicited opinions on social norms, immigrants, income inequality, and the likeliness of a terrorist attack. Disgust was indexed to how likely respondents were to disagree that “gays are free to live as they wish.”

Economics graduates often topped the list, the authors found, but engineering students most consistently scored higher across all of the measures.

By way of contrast, Gambetta and Hertog also explored which traits and disciplines applied to the opposite end of the political spectrum. Disgust seldom cropped up among those on the political left. And groups like the Baader-Meinhof Gang, in 1970s Germany, and Italy’s Red Brigades included few engineers but attracted plenty of social-science and humanities majors.

(Let me rephrase that bit about disgust measures: social conservatives are better at math. Note also the assumption that no one could have reasons to think sodomy should not be tolerated.) Now I’m starting to see the pattern: what’s worrying about engineering students is their intellectual and political diversity. Because these programs don’t exclusively attract white-hating Leftists (unlike, say, anthropology), and because there is little political indoctrination in engineering programs or in the math and science classes they must take from other departments, ideological uniformity is never achieved. And, in fact, this does explain everything. The Red Brigades gets the humanities and social science majors because it affirms the basic worldview of the global Leftist order into which these students are indoctrinated. It is just more zealous in following accepted beliefs. Engineers, by contrast, are not indoctrinated into Islamism or white supremacy, but because they’re not strongly indoctrinated by their program at all, there’s a lot more scatter in their beliefs, so they end up being overrepresented in all these heretical movements.

There’s also this surprising admission:

Perhaps, then, the reason engineers turn up so frequently among jihadists is not because of their nationality or religion but because of how they think. Would it be going too far to say that?

The body of research on the psychology of terrorism remains too thin to draw many broad conclusions, says Jeffrey I. Victoroff, a clinical associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, who studies terrorism.

The need for closure, he says, is an example of systematic thinking, or a preference for conducting analysis without the distraction of emotions. In some cases, systematic thinking is accompanied by traits like self-aggrandizement and low levels of empathy. But that cluster of characteristics isn’t necessarily dangerous, he says. Maybe one person in five has them, he guesses. These people might seek rule-bound jobs, like engineering or computer science. They probably wouldn’t blow themselves up.

Do we see a hint that the problem with engineers is not just intellectual diversity but a tendency for abstract, systematic thinking? Old-school Marxism used to attract these types (as did Catholicism, Calvinism, Islam, and a number of other systematic worldviews), but they don’t thrive as well under Leftist orthodoxy, where staying out of trouble depends less on correctly reasoning from official Leftist beliefs and more on avoiding unwritten social taboos and anticipating when conspicuous displays of compassion or outrage are to be expected, skills which require empathy more than logic.

Of course, Dr. Victoroff is correct and reasonable to point out that a habit of systematic thinking isn’t necessarily dangerous. The whole article is filled with reassuring statements like this. But if systematic thinking isn’t a problem, why are we talking about it at all? The impression we are supposed to take away, although often not explicitly stated, is always clear enough. There are still majors where people can graduate without demonstrating the correct opinions and internalizing elite social taboos, and this is bad because it leads to things like al-Qaeda.

is that the Walt Disney Company probably does more to promote nostalgia for traditionally feminine and masculine archetypes (not to mention for medieval, white, European monarchy) than American Christians. You can take that as a statement about Disney’s hypocritical double game or about the ineffectuality of today’s Christians, but it’s quite arguable.

Christians are to be persecuted because they can’t practice plausible deniability like Disney and the purchasers of its products. (The little girls who are its ultimate consumers, on the other hand, are always threatening to give the game away.) I sometimes get the sense that Disney executives don’t really like their product and try to be extra PC to compensate. I foresee fairy tales being more and more regarded the way we used to regard pornography; nowadays, it’s just a different aspect of human sexuality that we repress.

One wonders what the world of these anti-discrimination laws coupled with the the gay-rights media lynch mob will be like. Potentially anyone who expresses moral disapproval of homosexuality could be turned into an unemployable social pariah, a fate most people find worse than death. If around half of the country remains firm against the sodomy agenda, it will be completely impractical to do that to all of them, but I expect the vast majority to cave. Still, ruining even one percent of the population would still be quite an exertion, white a burden on the rest. More likely, it will work like Steve Sailer’s metaphorical “eye of Soros”, where ruin will randomly be visited on some people who express forbidden thoughts but not others. I’m reminded of the episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation with a planet where the punishment for every crime, no matter how trivial, is death, but the police only monitor one spot per day, and no one knows where that spot is.

I sometimes hear calls from Christians to boycott companies that are calling for our persecution. By all means, if you want to avoid buying products from Disney or the NFL or whoever because you think it’s cooperation in evil or just they’ve made you so mad you wouldn’t enjoy their products anyway, go ahead and do it. But I’m always against organized, announced boycotts from our side for the simple reason that they will certainly fail to hurt their target, and it’s bad for all sorts of reasons to demonstrate your weakness to the enemy.

Pope Francis will celebrate the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper with young refugees in Castelnuovo di Porto, about 15 miles north of Rome.

“Washing the feet of the refugees, Pope Francis is asking for respect for each one of them,” wrote Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the main organiser of the Vatican’s Year of Mercy initiatives.

Announcing the location for the Pope’s celebration on March 24, Archbishop Fisichella noted that many of the young people at the Centre for Asylum Seekers are not Catholic, which makes Pope Francis’s decision to wash their feet “even more eloquent.”

Indeed.

I expect the three Muslim footwashees (out of 12–we can at least be grateful they aren’t a majority this time around) will understand the symbolism far better than Archbishop Fisichella.

Mortal sins themselves are often scandalous. For example, my mortal sins might set a bad example for my kids. However, in this series, I want to talk about the scandal of the idea of mortal sin, ways that the idea of a single act condemning a person to hell offends our sense of fairness and motivation, and how this sense of scandal can be diffused. In this first part, I’ll consider one’s response to the idea of some people in the abstract die in mortal sin. In the next part, I’ll discuss the motives of a person realizing that he is personally in a state of mortal sin.